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How Excellent, The NSA Spies Upon The Visa And SWIFT Networks

The latest revelation from the Edward Snowden files concerning the National Security Agency is that the NSA spies upon the financial networks around the world. Specifically, that it monitors, as far as it can, transactions on both the VISA and SWIFT networks. I will admit that this doesn’t surprise me at all and would go further, this sounds like just the sort of thing that we have a spy agency for.

The German version of the story in Der Speigel is here, the English translation here.

Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company’s complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.

Their aim was to gain access to transactions by VISA customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to one presentation. The goal was to “collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions.”

The reason that we have the NSA in the first place is for them to try and gain currently secret information about the current and potential enemies of this country and the citizenry of this country. On the basis that follow the money is a useful technique to identify people organising any form of activity, from politics to terrorism, I would therefore expect a spy agency charged with attempting to protect us to attempt to monitor financial transactions.

The NSA’s Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely.

We recently fined HSBC some number of billions of dollars for not keeping the correct bureaucratic records concerning such transactions. Records that were again supposed to be part of the control of attempts to transfer money being used in nefarious transactions (and do please note, it really was the lack of the appropriate bureaucratic records and methods that led to the fine, not proof perfect that nefarious money had been transacted).

We do, after all, have a plethora of laws about exactly the same issues. Every bank must know the real name and identity of those transacting with it, precisely so as to beat terrorist financing methods. Transactions of over $10,000 in cash must be declared to the authorities by those same banks, precisely to as to track the finances of various potentially nefarious parties.

Am I happy that your and my transactions may well be swept up in these attempts to track the bad guys? No , most certainly not, and the various spies themselves seem to be a little concerned about the reach of their activities:

But even intelligence agency employees are somewhat concerned about spying on the world finance system, according to one document from the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ concerning the legal perspectives on “financial data” and the agency’s own cooperations with the NSA in this area. The collection, storage and sharing of politically sensitive data is a deep invasion of privacy, and involved “bulk data” full of “rich personal information,” much of which “is not about our targets,” the document says.

But nor am I in the slightest surprised that these spy agencies are indeed monitoring the world’s financial transactio9ns systems as much as they can. That rather seems to be the purpose of having a spy agency in the first place, that they will attempt to uncover the activities of our current and potential enemies. And my second reason for not being surprised at all is that we also have a vast raft of laws aimed at exactly the same point, attempting to both monitor and disrupt the financial activities of those said current and possibly future enemies. Meaning that if we’re going to have spies at all this is exactly what I would expect them to be trying to do.

It’s also worth noting that as long as the agencies are focusing their activities on the actions of foreigners then there’s not even anything illegal happening by our domestic laws. If they’re mass tapping the VisaVisa and or SWIFT networks inside the US then this is a very different matter. Further, this is hardly the first time that The US Government has been caught having a peek at SWIFT. The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program was unveiled in the press some 8 years ago in all its glory and there is even now an agreement between the EU and the US that at least some such tracking is just fine and dandy.

This isn’t all that much of a revelation from Snowden therefore as we already knew very well that this was going on, actually have governmental agreements to cover it and this is what we expect a spy agency to be doing anyway. Indeed, Snowden’s revelations seem to apply specifically to that Tracfin program which was revealed back in June 2006 and subsequently agreed to be legal by US law. Whatever else this is it isn’t new information.

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